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James Currier, founder of Ooga Labs, center, with his workers Keaka Jackson, left, and Evan Pon, right, at their downtown office in San Francisco, CA, on Friday, May, 11, 2007. photo taken: ... more

Photo: MIKE KANE

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Ooga Labs co-founder James Currier, right, looks on as Kevin Ho, seated, tries out a trial website during a "street test" session in which Ooga employees take web products in development out to the street in front of their office to see what passersby think, in San Francisco, CA, on Friday, May, 11, 2007. photo taken: 5/11/07
Mike Kane / The Chronicle James Currier Kevin Ho MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT less

OOGA_057_MBK.JPG
Ooga Labs co-founder James Currier, right, looks on as Kevin Ho, seated, tries out a trial website during a "street test" session in which Ooga employees take web products in development out ... more

Photo: MIKE KANE

Social networking meets social change

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Even in a city that has seen it all, in an industry that has invented it all, the experiment taking place on a busy San Francisco sidewalk turned heads.

Two weeks ago, a group of young Internet entrepreneurs wheeled a metal table and a leather chair onto a patch of Market Street. Scribbled in bright marker on a makeshift box shielding a laptop from the wind and glare was the invitation: "Test drive our Web site."

Like a carnival pitchman, James Currier, the company's wiry founder, in a tie-dye T-shirt and untamed beard, coaxed passers-by to pull up a seat so he could find out what they liked and don't like about GoodTree, a new social network and search engine that sends money to a charity the user selects with each click.

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The five-minute street test demonstrates Currier's radical thinking. Rather than hire people to test new products or run focus groups, Currier routinely relies on the kindness of strangers to give him instant feedback -- for free.

Currier, who struck it big by selling his first startup Tickle to Monster.com in 2004 for more than $100 million, is determined to make his latest venture, Ooga Labs, as innovative as its products. He calls it a "technology greenhouse," a hydroponic environment that harnesses so much energy and ingenuity that it can nurture a crop of companies. The 13-employee San Francisco startup currently has five stealth projects under development, including GoodTree.

Until recently, the Internet incubator was dismissed as bubble-era folly. But the comeback of Idealab, the original Internet incubator founded in the 1990s, and the early success of Obvious Corp., the San Francisco idea factory that spawned Twitter, the popular Internet messaging phenomenon that tells your friends what you're doing at any given moment, are generating renewed interest in testing many ideas at once and turning the best of them into businesses.

The future belongs to those pioneers who are shaking up how they run their businesses and build products, says Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist at the Stanford School of Engineering. Most assumptions about how to succeed in high tech amount to nothing more than "myth and ceremony," he said. "I like the idea of treating the organization, not just its products, as an unfinished prototype."

At 39, Currier has gained a reputation as the kind of startup philosopher who questions authority with the intensity of Timothy Leary, the '60s icon. He has spent his entire career figuring out how everyone else does something so he can do it differently. That counterculture mind-set so prevalent in Silicon Valley helped his first Internet startup not only survive but thrive in the dot-com bust.

Now his goal is to build a startup shop that will sustain a constant cycle of innovation for decades to come. He is such a believer that he's bankrolling this vision himself rather than allow investors to pull the strings. In fact, Currier decided not to have a board of directors at all. Instead, he assembled a group of talented technologists to act as a board of advisers to help out with ideas and tips when Currier and his merry band of engineers and designers get stumped. Among them is Philip Rosedale, famous for creating Second Life, a popular virtual world on the Internet where 2 million people create computer-generated versions of themselves called avatars and hang out an average of four hours a day working and playing.

"James' approach is to foster an environment in which projects are meaningfully collaborated on by multiple individuals," said Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life. "That collective input will be essential to his success."

That cult of collaboration is apparent even in the company name. Currier liked it because it sounded tribal. "When I close my eyes and say the word 'ooga,' I see a bunch of people joined together by the same goal, jumping around the fire," he said. He has recruited an eclectic clan of nerds to become mavericks. He has done away with most other jobs and departments and made the geeks -- in the words of one Ooga staffer -- "first-class employees."

The small staff is organized into two-person speed teams, each pair an engineer and designer, who are the only employees working on one of the five businesses. They sit side by side in an open pit in Ooga Labs' Financial District office so people can get to know one another and what everyone is working on. The large room, outfitted with Ikea furniture and bright-colored balls and toys, features a blue couch in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows where Ooga employees can people watch, snooze or read some of the dog-eared books such as "How to Change the World" and "The Art of Innovation."

In a company with hardly any hierarchy, people talk and act freely, even walk around barefoot or perform backflips. They share everything: research, software code, bad jokes. Each feels empowered to make critical decisions. Everyone gets paid the same salary and gets equity in each of the five startups being incubated. And they all get the kind of benefits more common at major corporations. The resulting camaraderie is palpable in the ping-pong-paced banter and in the employees' favorite pasttime: Calvinball, named after the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, played with fitness balls and rules they make up as they go along.

Currier works hard to nurture this "no politics, no -- holes" culture. Job candidates must take an online personality test with 19 questions ranging from "Which movie or literary character do you identify with most?" to "What do people misperceive about you?" Only half the people who apply are called in for gang interviews, where everyone gets to ask questions. A job offer comes with a catch: The new hire and the company each have three months to decide if it's a good fit. If not, Currier helps arrange for a job somewhere else.

Part of the lure for the Ooga staff is being able to work on ideas with the potential to make a difference, building Internet companies that tackle family, education and other important social issues without the pressure to maximize profits. Currier also wants Ooga products to mirror the new age of openness on the Web.

One day, GoodTree will be an open social network where the users call the shots on everything from building new features to electing the CEO, Currier says. At least that's the idea. Like any other startup, Currier's team will have to change tack many times before deciding if an idea will fly or flop, he says. And that takes a certain faith and fearlessness.

Currier is known for taking risks. In 1993, he spent three weeks sailing with four others from Cape Cod to Norway on a 41-foot aluminum boat. He's also known as someone who goes after what he wants. Seven years ago, when Currier couldn't find an a cappella group that would have him, he formed his own, the Richter Scales.

Not surprisingly, that kind of entrepreneurial pluck runs in the family. Currier grew up in an old wood-heated farmhouse with 12 cats and one dog a mile from the nearest paved road in New Hampshire, where his father, a bearded intellectual with a master's degree from the Sorbonne, settled down to a quiet rural life as a contractor with Currier's stepmother, a music teacher. In his day, Currier's grandfather traveled the country, selling his prized invention, the first baseball pitching machine.

Currier got his start in business at the age of 6, selling worms. A series of entrepreneurial endeavors encouraged him to take a year off from college to start an underwear company called "Hang Loose Boxers."

It was only after attending Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University on full scholarships that Currier embarked on his high-tech adventures. After graduating in 1990, he took a series of jobs, ultimately landing as a venture capitalist in Boston, where he prospected for Internet startups and got a glimpse of his future. In January 1998, he enrolled at Harvard Business School. Within months he had the idea that would lead to his first Internet gambit, Tickle, which made its mark in the field of online personality tests with such whimsical questions as "What breed of dog are you?" and "Who's your celebrity match?"

Currier used the success of that first breakthrough idea to spawn others, building up several businesses in one company. Soon Tickle was being called the hottest startup you have never heard of. Currier had to decide whether to try to hitch a ride on the coattails of the Google initial public offering or sell Tickle to a larger company. He chose the latter.

For years, Currier had been toying with the idea of Ooga Labs. Now he could do more than brainstorm. He joined forces with his Tickle right-hand man, 36-year-old technologist and Ooga Labs co-founder Stan Chudnovsky, who was known at Tickle and now at Ooga for his "Stan-isms" and telling Russian jokes that don't always work in translation. Together, they plotted Ooga Labs during late-night conversations and weekend family gatherings.

In early 2006, Ooga Labs began camping out at the Second Life offices in San Francisco, in the "Ice Box," a conference room so named because of the relentless rush of arctic air and the absence of windows. Five months later, they moved to more temperate quarters and began hiring. They're not ready to talk publicly about any of their projects except GoodTree, a business that is farther along, one that Currier bought back from Monster.com.

Currier describes GoodTree as a "cause-related social network where people who care about the same things can find each other, support each other, and organize to make a positive difference in the world." Every time a user goes on the site to meet up with friends or surf the Web, a portion of the advertising revenue goes to a favorite cause or charity.

Underneath an overcast sky in the Financial District, Currier is getting into GoodTree's street test. He beckons to Kevin Ho, a 34-year-old network analyst with the nonprofit Jewish Community Federation, who test-drives the site and says he likes the look and feel. Tai Skyers, a 25-year-old market researcher and massage therapist, is delighted when she finds the "Save Darfur" T-shirt she is wearing on the GoodTree search engine. Currier and his cohorts take detailed notes as strangers surf the site. The rest of the startup staff watches and waves from the window of Ooga Labs' headquarters two flights up.

Currier waves back. "I love this," he said, grinning. "I could do it all day long."

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